The Institute of Medicine (IOM) is taking chronic fatigue syndrome seriously. An IOM report called it a "serious, complex, multisystem disease" that physicians and other healthcare professionals need to view as "real" and diagnose. The report proposed calling it "systemic exertion intolerance disease."[5]

"It's time to stop saying that this is a just figment of people's imagination. This is a real disease, with real physical manifestations that need to be identified and cared for," said Committee Chair Ellen Wright Clayton, MD, JD. She is a professor of pediatrics and director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society at Vanderbilt University. Elsewhere in the world the illness is called "myalgic encephalomyelitis."